Denver Broncos 41 Arizona Cardinals 20: Good and Bad

The Good:

• Make it straight, forget about all records breaking thing in this game, Denver won because of the Defense. They played outright tough and great. This defense is becoming one of the strongest unit of the league. The offense with his 41 points will be listed in the Bad category, stay tuned.
• Emmanuel Sanders caught some tough balls in this game, moving the chains early on in some critical situation. He could still get better in the mental part of his game but nobody can deny he’s having a great start with the Broncos.
• Demaryious Thomas played like he used to play last year but with one year of experience more. Result? Record broken and more records will come, if Broncos FO will be able to sign him before he becomes FA.
• Von Miller is little by little coming back to the player he was in his first two years.
• Burse looked to be inspired as PR.
• The D-Line looked awesome, the Cardinals had no shot in the running game…..and they are a running team…
• The quantity of pressure this Defense is able to bring, if required, astonishes….it would be curious to see how many sacks the Broncos would pile on if blitzes will be called more often.
• Say what you want but Talib, IMO, had another really impressive game. He got beaten once, but he was there and stout the entire game…
• As Talib, Harris was  impressive…..the sad part of it is that I don’t think the Broncos will have the money to retain him. He’s probably the best Nº2 cornerback in the league at least and can still become a great Nº 1….
• Incredible to see, opponents don’t try to run between the tackles because Broncos DTs are too good for that…..I could not even imagine to think this a couple of years ago….

The Bad:

• The offense was really putrid until the fourth quarter. No discussion. It was really bad to watch and to see that most of this malfunction looked to depend on sense of accomplishment…there was one great play followed by multiple stupid errors over and over again.
• The offense play calling was as bad as the way offensive players were playing….
• The running game has been a joke almost all the game, even though Hillman did few nice things in the second half. Still no running game to establish the game. It’s really a bad sign looking ahead to come from the bye week with no improvement over this area….oh yeah…the improvement was to not run the ball at all and to ask Manning to throw wounded ducks all over the field with bad timing to have more excitement keeping the game close.
• More on Manning….the 500 TD pass was an awesome pass. Give to Caesar what it’s Ceaser’s. The rest of the first half and the beginning of the second half was the most putrid Manning performance I ever seen. I don’t care about some great random pass as the one to Thomas for the 86 yards TD. The 2 INTs are both on Manning and were bad passes. Plus some more overthrowns and other stupid check downs that generated one or 0 yards on 1^st and 10. Are you kidding me?
• Denver leaded the game the whole time after its first offensive series also because the Cardinals shoot themselves in the foot several times with incredible drops. I recall at least two 3^rd downs not covered by the Cardinals for some horrendous WR drops.
• Oline: Offensive penalties and run blocking –> terrible.
• Some team will give a lot of money to Julius Thomas the next offseason; until he won’t consistently block well I don’t forecast the Broncos to show him this big amount of money…..let’s say the Bills or the Raiders will….not any wise organization….to have a great pass catcher TE that cannot block consistently makes your offense one dimensional when he’s on the field…..everybody knows it’s a pass….

My take:

The defense is coming along really strong. The offense is putting out smoke. I don’t care about records and the offense looked lost for a long time in this game. Only when Stanton went out of the game it looked like Manning & Co. find confortable with them. I don’t know how much play calling come into this but I have no problems saying that IMO Del Rio is calling much better plays even given that I would like the Broncos to blitz much more than what they actually do….Denver D-Line is good but is not Seattle….to create real constant problems 5 men rush is needed….not only 4.

I would have liked to see more trick plays on offense, out of the bye it looked like the bye never happened on this matter.

The running game is putrid. This could be because of schemes, lack of playmakers or bad O-Line performance. Or a mix of the three as I see it. This has to change if Denver wishes to get back to the SB. San Diego is becoming really self-confident and it’s a great virtue in football. The offense really struggles to pass the ball when great pressure is brought to the passer….because Manning cannot scramble….so the running game is vital for this team….incredible that since the SB Broncos coaches didn’t engineered something to make up for this.

So a win is a win but the offensive performance was really shaky…..and I know that everybody is talking about records and yards gained…..all of these are smoke to me…the reality is that I start  not trusting this offense.

Still: Go Broncos!!!